10 things you might not know about Chinese leaders

Mark Jacob and Stephan BenzkoferChicago Tribune reporters

In recent decades, China has transformed its economy into a powerhouse. Yet the communist country has doubled down on repression of its citizens. Enter Xi Jinping, who took over this month as China's leader. Few are expecting immediate reforms from this party stalwart with interesting relatives. Xi's father fought with communist leader Mao Zedong and was purged before the Cultural Revolution. Xi's wife is a popular folk singer. His daughter is studying at Harvard under a pseudonym and is a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Now it's time for her father's initiation — and perhaps some hazing. Here's a look at past Chinese leaders:

1/ Di Xin, whose reign ended the Shang Dynasty around 1050 B.C., was remembered as a decadent leader who once threw a party featuring a pond filled with wine, allowing 3,000 guests to slurp up the booze like cattle.

2/ Decades before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue with fewer than 100 men in three small ships, a Chinese naval leader commanded 27,000 men in a fleet of more than 300 ships. Admiral Zheng He made seven famous voyages covering thousands of miles to points as far west as India, the Middle East and Africa. British historian Gavin Menzies even claims that part of the fleet sailed as far as both coasts of North and South America, Greenland and the Arctic Sea in 1421-1423.

3/ When the philosopher Confucius served as an adviser to the Duke of Lu, a neighboring lord grew worried about Lu's power. To create a rift between the duke and his straight-laced counselor, the lord sent 100 good horses and 80 dancing girls to the duke, who spent three days ignoring his official duties and enjoying his gifts. A disgusted Confucius left his service.

4/ Qin Shi Huang, possibly best known for being buried with his terra cotta army, was the first emperor of a unified China. During his reign from 221 BC to 210 BC, he did much to modernize the country, including instituting standardized written language, currency and measurements, and building an extensive highway system. The flip side was that he was extremely cruel. He buried 400 Confucian scholars alive, and ordered all books written before his Qin Dynasty to be burned.

5/ Leadership has its privileges. When the Chinese first developed the seismograph in A.D. 132, it was kept at the emperor's palace. And when the Chinese invented toilet paper in the 14th century, it was for the emperor's household only.

6/ Wu Zetian was China's only ruling empress. A woman of noble birth, she was a Buddhist nun before becoming the emperor's concubine. Through ruthless palace intrigue, she became the ruler herself in 690, displacing her own son. During her reign, peace prevailed, a merit system for government posts was encouraged — and women's rights advanced considerably.

7/ Kublai Khan, the ruler of ancient China who is most famous in the Western world, was not even Chinese — he was a Mongol invader whose Yuan Dynasty controlled China for only a century. But that snapshot of China endured because it coincided with a visit from a Venetian traveler named Marco Polo.

8/ Like other empires, China experienced betrayal and murder over the succession of its leaders. An emperor's son who was designated crown prince was sometimes marked for death. But the Qing Dynasty (1644-1917), created a countermeasure: No crown prince was publicly announced in most cases. Rather, an emperor on his deathbed would write his choice of successor on a piece of paper that was placed in a lockbox, to be opened by top government officials after the emperor's death.

9/ Eager to avoid the cult of personality he saw in the Soviet Union with the permanent display of Vladimir Lenin's and Josef Stalin's bodies, Mao Zedong insisted that Chinese communist leaders be cremated. But when he died in 1976, the Politburo ignored his wishes and decided to preserve him. Unfortunately, the Chinese did not have the expertise, and the gruesome process saw the Chairman's corpse so badly bloated that formaldehyde oozed out of its pores. But it was eventually made presentable and displayed.

10/ The Republic of China, the anti-communist government that was defeated by Mao's army and relocated to Taiwan in the late 1940s, has developed a more open political system. But democracy can sometimes be messy. Fistfights erupted among Taiwanese lawmakers in the '70s and '80s, and a 2004 lunch meeting of legislators turned into a food fight, with rice, meat, vegetables and hard-boiled eggs flying across the room. "My whole body smells like a lunchbox!" politician Chu Fong-chi said afterward.

Mark Jacob is a deputy metro editor at the Tribune; Stephan Benzkofer is the newspaper's weekend editor.

Sources: "This Is China: The First 5,000 Years," by Haiwang Yuan; "China Condensed: 5000 Years of History & Culture," by Siew Chey Ong; "The Analects of Confucius," translated by James Legge; "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War," by Robert M. Gates; "Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China," by James L. Watson; "Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao's China," by James Palmer; "Mao Zedong's China," by Kathlyn Gay; "The Early Civilization of China," by Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell; "China: The Land and the People," by Keith Buchanan, Charles P. FitzGerald and Colin A. Ronan; "The Revolution in Geology From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment," by Gary D. Rosenberg; Washington Post; Associated Press.